ABSTRACT
Ben Jonson’s Poetaster has many themes, but its overarching preoccupation is with the status of poetry and theater in Jonson’s own period. By the time he wrote Poetaster, Jonson had become famous for a type of play he called “comical satire,” a genre that brought realistic scenes from London life to the stage in order to poke fun at caricatures of people Jonson observed around him, to model sophisticated urban behavior, and to voice Jonson’s own moral and literary philosophy through the mouths of key characters. Poetaster, Jonson’s fifth play (his fourth to appear in print), has several of these features: young would-be poets collide with their angry fathers, pretentious citizens mix hopefully with sophisticated members of court, colorful street characters invent schemes to defraud their betters and to escape punishment by the authorities. But instead of using a contemporary London backdrop, as he did in his earlier plays, Jonson sets his scene in ancient Rome during the Augustan age, a peak period of imperial power and literary culture that inspired Jonson’s own views of poetry, and a period that he and many of his contemporaries—including the soon-to-be King James I—sought to emulate. In a gesture of authorial confidence that borders on grandiosity, Jonson brings the ancient Roman poets Ovid, Horace, and Virgil back to life and models many of the characters, lines, and even entire scenes of his own play directly on their work. Horace acts as the play’s literary and moral conscience, and he is an obvious figure for Jonson himself. Among Roman authors, Horace was Jonson’s most influential stylistic and moral model. In 1604 or 1605 Jonson translated Horace’s famous treatise on poetry, the Ars Poetica, into English, and Poetaster III.v is a defense of satire lifted straight from one of Horace’s own poems. In Poetaster the character Horace espouses a vision of virtue that is identical to Jonson’s own opinions and, like Jonson, he circulates his epigrams, odes, and elegies among a group of accomplished poet-friends, who include the legendary literary patron Mecoenas and no less a figure than the Emperor Augustus himself.
